


His Scent

by beetle



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-20
Updated: 2013-05-20
Packaged: 2017-12-12 10:42:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/810668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beetle/pseuds/beetle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Xangelus pr0n-wi'out-plot written for the _xangel prompt, fresh. None-too angsty, aprrox. 900 words.</p>
            </blockquote>





	His Scent

**Author's Note:**

> Notes/Spoilers/Warnings: This could be AU, could be post-Chosen/NFA. You decide.

  
_Something's missing,_  Angelus thinks with great dissatisfaction.  
  
His childe struggles out of the ground, cheap burial suit torn under the arms and down the back. Clods of grave-dirt and surprised earthworms drop out of his too-long hair to writhe on the disturbed plot.   
  
“Angelus. . . ?” desperation and hunger given voice--one Herculean push and the boy’s free of his grave. He gets to his knees and looks around, his dark, empty gaze sweeping the graveyard frantically, falling at last on _Sire_ , perched and brooding on a tombstone.  
  
The boy's nostrils flare delicately and he shivers, staring intently at the erection Angelus's leather pants do nothing to conceal.   
  
Angelus suddenly realizes--it’s the scent that's missing. His childe smells of . . . of nothing at all, but earth and the wooden box he'd clawed his way out of.  
  
 _Hmm. . . ._ “Stand up, childe.”  
  
And while every vampire’s scent is different--Darla had been wild roses and opium. Drusilla was faded lilacs, corrupted purity and tears. William was cherrywood and new vellum, with whispery hints of iron--underneath their individual scents all predators, alive or undead, smell of the same thing.  
  
Except for, apparently, Angelus's boy.  
  
The boy stands up, dusting himself off ineffectually. He seems uncertain of his limbs, overwhelmed by the bright, bleached light of the moon and the weight of his Sire's stare. But he silently awaits Angelus’s next commands with the eager-to-serve readiness of a stewardess.   
  
Or perhaps a well-trained puppy.  
  
“Strip, and get over here,” Angelus says tersely. The boy obeys, shedding dirty clothing with every step. The _rrrrrrip!_  of fabric is loud and grating in the placid night.   
  
Darla had claimed Angelus’s own scent, before and after death had been incense--though sanctity and Liam hadn’t been on speaking terms for some years--old blood and damnation.  
  
 _The scent of Hell, itself,_  she'd said with a smirk.  
  
Yet this boy smells of  _nothing_. Well, very faintly of synthetic fibers and mothballs--not so faintly of his grave. But he doesn't carry the scent of Angelus's, or his claim.  
  
Intolerable. As the boy himself might once have said--the no-scent thing is really starting to give Angelus _major_  wiggins.  
  
Between one blink and the next, he's off the tombstone, tearing at his fly and dragging the boy close. Angelus bends him over the tombstone, expecting at least token resistance; when he doesn’t get it, he takes the boy with one hard thrust, pressing his nose to the spot just behind his left ear.   
  
Earth and pine; the scent of inhumation, yet no scent of the death that occasioned it.   
  
“What are you?" Angelus demands, unsurprised when he receives no answer but gasps and groans. He pulls out and slams back in--hard enough and often enough that something in the boy tears, and bleeds quite profusely.  _Scentlessly_. "Why can't I smell you, even now?”  
  
"Sire, please. . . ."   
  
If it weren't for the solid flesh in his grip and for the convulsive flutter of muscles around his cock, Angelus would doubt the boy's existence and his own sanity. Had he not once been as daft as Drusilla . . . trapped and run mad behind the prison bars of the  _soul_?  
  
But no. That time had passed and this isn't madness. This is some trick--the final vengeance of a Slayer and her pet witch, both laughing in their graves.  
  
"What  _are_  you, boy?  _Tell me!_ " Angelus's hands tighten on hip and shoulder till he can hear and feel bones creaking, feel skin give at the urging of his nails. Blood as odorless as the boy bleeding it coats Angelus's cock and runs down his fingers. It hits the earth audibly, a blank, pointless patter of red rain.   
  
“Your childe!” The boy pants, trying to push back onto Angelus with needy little whimpers. He's aroused and frightened; Angelus should have scented that even before the boy knew it himself. "That's what I am--that's _all_  I am, please. . . .”  
  
Something about that voice, so prettily submissive and endearingly confused cuts through Angelus’s frustration. This boy-- _his_  boy has no scent?   
  
Then Angelus will paint him in blood and pain and come, until his claim is flashing and undeniable like a neon sign . . . for all to see.   
  
He nips the boy’s shoulder once, not quite hard enough to break the skin. Not yet. . . .  
  
“ _Whose_  are you, Xander?” Oscar-caliber disinterest.  
  
“Y-yours!“ The boy is shaking and coming, his hoarse yells drifting up to the sky. “Yours, Si-!“   
  
Angelus sinks his fangs into cool, salty skin--ready for blood as thin and tasteless as water. Consequently, he's rather unprepared for the way the first drops explode on his tongue; spicy but mellow, like mulled wine, bright and welcoming, like the memory of sunshine.  
  
Unprepared for phantom echoes of opium, iron and ruined purity that engulf his senses.  
  
Unprepared for the realization that fresh-mown grass and newly-turned earth  _is_  his boy's scent. One Angelus so readily dismissed, that he'd missed his boy entirely.   
  
But threading through these scents, like the refrain to a hymn, is incense and sanctity.  _Angelus's scent_  . . . and something else, as well . . . something too dark and too complex to be innocence, but not bitter enough to be damnation--  
  
". . . yours,  _always_. . . ."  
  
\--not yet, anyway.   
  
Angelus comes with a roar, and a nearly beatific smile on his face.


End file.
